


Balaclava

by Bidawee



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Ambiguity, Animal Death, Bisexual Male Character, Infidelity, Misunderstandings, Multi, One-Sided Attraction, Repression, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 17:37:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21140588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bidawee/pseuds/Bidawee
Summary: John has watched him come back from his hunts in his worn-down pickup truck. He’s seen Morgan loop his arms around the limp sack of meat he’s shot, hauling it to his backyard so that he can hack into it; a seesaw motion that separates the meat from the bone. It’s tenderized by the hand that laces the meat with salt, depositing it in a metal basin to his left. It’s not a sight for the faint of heart.





	Balaclava

**Author's Note:**

> ill bring this ship to life, if it kills me

John has been brainstorming ideas for dinner since Mia had left for work with the remains of last night’s chicken salad in a small Tupperware container. The normal, slow tempo of buttered toast and grapefruit in the morning was sped ahead by her running to the car with the excuse that she would be late for work. She barely touched what was on her plate. 

He’d blame morning sickness but it’s more than that. Lately, she’s become particular over what she eats, both because of the baby and what she calls her new “all-natural” diet, sourced from an old parenting magazine they read in the waiting r oom of the Obstetrician's office. He doesn’t always follow along with her schemes but it’s not his time nor place to judge her decisions.

He has done his best to follow her lead. It might take another five minutes to chop the vegetables and stir the added ingredients into the soup broth but he can’t say he’s complaining about having more to do around the house. At least he’s not stuck staring out at their front lawn, waiting for something to change in this wasteland of gray colour.

He doesn’t know what Mia sees in a place like this but he can’t say he’s surprised. She has always looked back fondly at her childhood, using old picture albums weathered by the passage of time to relate to John the experience of waiting by the window to get a taste of nan’s cornbread and buttermilk as a little girl. She lavished so much love on the old days, back before they had computers and phones in the house. Even before they started talking about engagement, she made it clear her child would grow up the same way she did: with clean air to breathe and friends next door to play with.

Needless to say, there are days when he likes it here and days when he doesn’t. Today, his patience is wearing thin, if only because the supplies in their fridge are beginning to dwindle and decline. They try to go to the grocery store once every two weeks to give them a decent stock but always end up watching the boxes, cans, and plastic packaging begin to vacate their fridge faster than they arrived.

On the ingredient part of the process, he scrapes by. The problem occurs when he checks the spice cupboard and sees an empty space where the salt should be. The shaker is by the sink, empty. Mia must have used the last of it.

It’s a thirty-minute drive to the grocery store on a good day, thirty minutes he technically doesn’t have, being on call. If it was anything other than salt, he could at least skip a step and get creative with his cooking. But it’s salt. 

That’s when he has the idea of going to Morgan: he goes through salt like a heavy smoker with his pack of cigarettes. John has watched him come back from his hunts in his worn-down pickup truck. He’s seen Morgan loop his arms around the limp sack of meat he’s shot, hauling it to his backyard so that he can hack into it; a seesaw motion that separates the meat from the bone. It’s tenderized by the hand that laces the meat with salt, depositing it in a metal basin to his left. It’s not a sight for the faint of heart.

Today, Morgan is on his porch, rinsing a slab of meat. It’s white and pink, oozing fluid over his hand. He watches Morgan’s fist grind into it, pressing down the mounds of muscle and fat. His arms bulge with strength.

The sound of the window’s flat plane shutter smacking the side of the house makes Morgan look up. Their eyes connect. The thin layer of skin covering John’s body disintegrates. 

Including the siding, fibreglass, and drywall, there have to be at least five layers of wall keeping Morgan outside and John in. It doesn’t matter: it feels like he has no protection. If Morgan took a step forward, he would be standing with his teeth in John’s throat. 

John yanks on the curtain until the living room is shut in. The tips of his fingers tingle. It feels like the nerve endings there have split into tiny hairs.

If he had anything better to do than pour himself a cup of lukewarm coffee, he might do that instead. Their house has a garden but the plants have withered away and died. Work is slow. He  _ would _ be cooking but alas, no salt. 

So it appears he doesn’t have a choice.

Morgan’s property is equal parts overgrown and cared for. The house’s gutters are clean and the front steps are scrubbed, yet there are what look like gopher holes dug into the front lawn. Some are caving in, while others peek into a black hole of nothing. The long, uncut grass grows in patches around flakes of leaf parts and medium-sized skipping stones.

John speeds up his walk and raps on the front door with his knuckles. He uses the porch canopy to hide from the rain as he waits. Drops of water plop onto the welcome mat, two inches to his right.

Just a second too late, the door pulls open. Morgan’s brows are heavy and push his eyes down. The flecks of stubble on his chin make him resemble a portrait of a sailor you would hang on a wall.

“Yes?” he asks, his voice gruff.

John clears his throat. “I’m sorry for just--I was wondering if you had any salt I could borrow?” The volume of his voice fluctuates. No two words sound the same.

Morgan disappears back into his house. The door is left open and cold air seeps in.

John massages the feeling back into his arms as he waits for him. There’s only a sliver of the interior to be seen from outside. Large black plastic bags cover the living room sofa. The carpet is spattered with colour. What hits him the most is the smell: like rotting leaves in a sewage drain. It invades his nostrils, singeing the hairs there. Once it’s inside his head, it breeds more thoughts than can comfortably live in his cranium, each one more morbid than the last.

Morgan reappears and shoves something into John’s hands. It’s a small plastic bowl with salt inside. Small moon-shaped decals wrap around the rim. 

For a second, John forgot the reason he was here. “Oh--wow. Thank you.”

Morgan’s young face glows with sweat. “Don’t mention it.” He strips the glove off his right hand, the latex stained purple with dried blood.

John doesn’t turn around until he’s back inside the safety of his own house, a small comfort at a time like this. Locking the door once isn’t sufficient. He does it twice. Three times. Enough to be sure no one can get in, not even the flame of Morgan’s eyes on the back of his neck.

After that, any semblance of an appetite in John is void. He entertains doing something easy for dinner, maybe cream of chicken soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. Anything, if it means he doesn’t have to cook with the salt. The bowl glistens with condensation on his kitchen counter, beside the fridge where he left it. 

Mia has a red paint stain on her blouse when she comes home. “From that kid, Jacob,” she says, as she leaves her purse by the door. John is drying lettuce leaves with a clean dish towel. She kisses him on the cheek.

“What are you making?”

“Chopped Thai salad, with peanut butter.”

Her face drops. “We had salad last night.”

“I, uh--we’re out of salt.”

“Is there not some of it right there?” She gestures to the see-through bowl of what might be salt.

He gulps. “Yes. But I had to ask Morgan for it.”

She slants her eyes. “Okay. So we should use it. I can stop by the store when I come home from work tomorrow and get us a new bag.” She wets her bottom lip. “And I can buy something nice for Morgan too.”

“Just because he gave us salt?”

“Yes, because it’s thanks to him that I’m going to have a proper dinner tonight.” She taps his cheek with her finger, then leaves the room.

John serves her the salad as an appetizer, with some potatoes and melted cheese mashed together as moussaka for the main course. She must be starving, because she shovels it into her mouth. John doesn’t have the stomach for it; he gives her his portion.

It’s not the first time he’s rubbed shoulders with Morgan but by far the most disturbing. Morgan just isn’t the kind of guy you get along with, even if he’s your only neighbour. He can stab and slice with one hand, the other wrapped around the thigh or throat of his kill. On the odd occasion that he catches John watching him, he twists his knife deeper into whatever he’s working on, down to the shaft.

Then there are the bags. Every morning at six, Morgan walks out in his long raincoat to the edge of the street with his green compost bin. He adds to the growing piles of black plastic bags, tied at the top by twists. John has run by them on his morning jog: they stink. He’s tempted to one day take a knife with him and peek at what’s inside, but Morgan is usually by the window, watching him. John has a feeling that he doesn’t want him looking.

Therein lies the problem that John  _ has _ been looking and can’t stop himself. There have been days when the organic matter inside the trash bags looked like hands or he could hear white-pitch screams in the distance. With Mia gone for so many hours in a day, the only thing he really can do is watch and wait, knowing Morgan is on the other end, following his every movement.

He confides in his wife a week later, over dinner preparations.

Her solution isn’t any better.

“You should go out hunting with him. Get to know him better.”

John’s first reaction is to rear back. “I don’t  _ want _ to get to know him. You’re not creeped out?”

“I actually spoke with him at the deli today.” She ducks her mouth into her turtleneck. “He’s a nice man. He said he’d love the company tomorrow, if you wanted to go with him.”

John drops his knife on the cutting board. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. He really wants to get to know you. You can’t just run away from him forever,” she says, dropping a bowl of onions into the pot. The brew bubbles.

Of course she would take Morgan’s side; she’s good in everything she does, down to the baby she’s growing in her belly. John has watched them speak on the boundary between their properties when they think he isn’t there. Mia might not see the venomous green glint in Morgan’s eyes, but John does. How’s he to know that it isn’t indicative of what’s to come--what Morgan’s capable of? He’d rather be the one on the receiving end.

That’s how he finds himself in the passenger seat of Morgan’s pickup that Saturday, looking out the window. He’s doing it for Mia, he tells himself, when Morgan shifts the car into gear. They drive off the roads and into the densely packed woods. The wheels grind the slanted rocks into fine particles, chewing them up and spitting them out behind the exhaust pipe. John keeps one hand on the door handle to steady himself.

All the while, he tries not to eye the collection of ropes and nets in the backseat. Morgan’s collection spans a couple inches high, some stained red from prior use. The frayed hemp at the ends shakes with the bumps they go over. John can see it waving at him from his peripheral view, warning him of what’s to come. He clenches his legs together, uncaring as his circulation cuts.

“You have nothing to be nervous about.” John’s eyes open. Morgan is looking out at the trail. “We’re almost there.”

It’s a pale reassurance in a place like this. The pine needles shake above him when he steps out of the truck, as if to mock him of the fact. He does his best to straighten his back and salvage the look of a man with pride. He slicks down his hair with the sweat of his hands.

John doesn’t know why he’s here, wouldn’t he be a disservice to Morgan’s quick feet and steady hands? It’s not like he’s improving Morgan’s chances in this barren land. The greenery--if you can even call it that--is decaying all around them. No living thing would go through the torture of foraging in a place like this.

And he’s right. There are no animals here. It’s a vacuum. All sound is swallowed up by the mushy earth. He’s having a hard enough time as is, following Morgan up the paths he uses to hike. The mud that squelches under his boots keeps trying to hold his feet in place. As disgusting as it is, if it weren’t for the gulp of suction, the belly of the forest would be dead silent. It’s an improvement on being alone with only his conscience and Morgan for company.

Eventually, the trees begin to split and they come to a clearing of mossy boulders. The area is populated by light shrubbery. If there was any sun, it would be able to break through the crown of canopy and touch the ground. It’s a perfect spot to stop and rest.

That’s when he hears it: a scramble of motion in the distance. It’s too small and indistinct to know what caused it, whether it’s a flock of birds erupting from the trees or the clamp of a deer’s hooves on the Shield.

A chain reaction follows. He hears the jangle of instruments on Morgan’s belt. There’s a click. John freezes on the spot. He braces himself for a piercing, cold pain to shoot through his right shoulder. He imagines the metal of the barrel on his forehead. He turns around.

There’s another mouth on his. Moist and warm. A red flush breaks out on his face when he smells the excitement on the other man’s breath.

Morgan is staring at him like he always is but strangely, his face has softened. There’s no tension in his shoulders, maybe there never was. He deflates into just a man. The only thing that remains the same is the interest sparking his eyes.

John’s cornered, in the middle of nowhere, and the dense tree cover is whispering to him. Their leaves touch his back, pushing him closer to Morgan, who keeps looking at him with heavy eyes.

“I see you looking.”

John’s heels dig into the malleable soil, wet with worms and the drops of rain. He wants to clamp his hands down over his ears and block out what Morgan’s saying. His mouth might move then but the words couldn’t prick John, as they do now.

Morgan stands firm, composed in every way that John is not.

“John?”

He doesn’t have any words to say. Even if he could manage speech right now, no words would come to mind. 

Morgan is looking at him, he’s looking  _ through _ him. 

He’s cut John right open.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on my [tumblr](https://cursivecherrypicking.tumblr.com/)


End file.
